The disclosure generally relates to the field of storage systems, and more particularly to zoned storage systems.
Consumers and businesses are both storing increasing amounts of data with third party service providers. Whether the third party service provider offers storage alone as a service or as part of another service (e.g., image editing and sharing), the data is stored on storage remote from the client (i.e., the consumer or business) and managed, at least partly, by the third party service provider. This increasing demand for cloud storage has been accompanied by, at least, a resistance to increased price per gigabyte, if not a demand for less expensive storage devices. Accordingly, storage technology has increased the areal density of storage devices at a cost of device reliability instead of increased price. For instance, storage devices designed with shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology increase areal density by increasing the number of tracks on a disk by overlapping the tracks.
Increasing the number of tracks on a disk increases the areal density of a hard disk drive without requiring new read/write heads. Using the same read/write head technology avoids increased prices. But reliability is decreased because more tracks are squeezed onto a disk by overlapping the tracks. To overlap tracks, SMR storage devices are designed without guard spaces between tracks. Without the guard spaces, writes impact overlapping tracks and a disk is more sensitive to various errors (e.g., seek errors, wandering writes, vibrations, etc.).